Frances

I think I understand your argument better. You're basically suggesting we refrain from political discussions so as to not provoke enmity or conflict between users. It's not really the issue of people being outright rude or salty as much as the one of sensitive ideas being brought up, yes?

Unless I'm reading you wrong, the crux of your argument rests on two points: that religion and politics are valueless topics of discussion for the community, and that other valueless and potentially harmful topics are already banned, thus these could be as well. Here's why I disagree on both accounts: Firstly, there's no intrinsic pertinence in religion or politics as far as SS13 is concerned. But is there any in... basically anything not directly related to SS13? The entire off topic boards exist, yet receive nearly as much discussion as the general ones. People discuss a lot of personal topics in OOC, ranging from videogames to cooking or their day-to-day lives. Religion & politics are roughly as relevant as that, yet I wouldn't deem any of the aforementioned topics as "valueless". Healthy communities, imo, should include (or at least allow) off-topic discussions. Sure, not all of them will interest or cater to everybody, but as individuals on here, we're defined by a sum of vast interests, not just our love for the game. It'd be a shame if people were unable to share that. Secondly, I think it's unfair to compare religion & politics to other banned topics of our chat. I've seen various moderation guidelines for online chats, ranging from "literally anything goes" to "no arguing or controversial topics whatsoever". I'd say the Aurora OOC currently ranges somewhere in the comfortable middle. We've got rules against excessive mentions of sex, drugs, or illegal acts. You can't deny there's a difference between that and religions & politics, though if you want me to try to explain further exactly why I think the latter should be allowed here when the former isn't, let me know and I'll do my best to write another post on that. One fact I will concede is that people do tend to get riled up more quickly on these subjects than they do discussing, say, ice cream. But I think that's just a symptom of the anger and behavioral issues some people have. I've had some fairly intelligent and satisfying conversations about both religion and politics with members of this community, and I think it'd be a shame if we lost the opportunity for those simply because other people couldn't behave themselves and we chose to install a blanket punishment instead of punishing these specific people. Are there currently more stupid conversations on this topic than intelligent ones? Maybe. But it'd be a shame to go after the discussion, when we should go after the stupid.

I feel like the situation described in this complaint was one where the antag's actions were rather evident, and there's a difference between letting someone escape and giving every nuke op the benefit of the doubt they won't shoot you. I mean, grey choices will be left up to the player's discretion, but sometimes I feel like I'm the only person who doesn't care at all if she gets robusted by antags. In the end, though, this just goes to show me how hard it is to come to an arrangement that makes everyone happy. Some people don't care about dying cheap deaths, some do, some always play to realism and some want to break all existing rules and conventions in the hopes of creating more interesting narratives. And all these players have to coexist on the same server without any of them being in the absolute right or wrong. It's kinda hardcore.

My take on this? A really long time ago, I was playing a generic engineer antag, and tried, during an event, to kidnap a CentCom official played by our previous headmin, YeahChris. I failed a stungloving attempt at the end of an interview quite pitifully, and since even back then CC was a pretty big deal (they didn't have bodyguards though), the official was forced to draw his gun on me. However, instead of simply shooting me down and sending me to sec, YeahChris had his character miss on purpose, even making a hilarious IC comment about how he was such a bad shot. It allowed me to escape and (for a short bit) create an interesting narrative where sec had to hunt me down in a to-that-point quiet round, instead of having the regular "arrested antag" RP which tends to be far less interesting than "antag on the loose". Now. I'm not saying everyone has to let antags get away all the time (I can already see Sue complaining if I did), but in situations where it would be unrealistic for your character to avoid conflict, yet solving conflict in a certain way leads to an unsatisfying resolution, your character's failure is an option. It doesn't make you any less of a player, imo, and actually marks you as a great roleplayer because you're willing to give others some leeway to allow them to create more interesting situations. I don't think what SenpaiShadow did deserves any punishment, but this kind of stuff is still worth an honest discussion, cause I believe everyone can take a bit of time out of their rounds to do cool stuff like that.

A very diverse audience will get offended at very diverse things. Whether we want to coddle OOC or not remains the community's personal preference - it's not highly important either way, and the same arguments as to why it could be heavily moderated apply as to why the people offended could simply mute it and move on (that is, OOC isn't the most important aspect of the game). I personally think that people should be allowed to discuss whatever they want as long as they're not openly, purposely insulting each other or saying some very offensive or ignorant things (though tumblr would probably like to redefine my definition of "ignorant".) In the end, though, opinions on this are very broad, and the easiest way to settle this debate is to let the administration decide for themselves.

Chats where people have toxic arguments about politics/religions are pretty stupid. Chat where all (or even just random) discussion subjects are banned to create a "welcoming atmosphere" can be pretty stupid too. In the end, the quality of the chat is by a big part left up to the quality of its moderators. Mods can probably make OOC a decent place while allowing religious and political debates. They can proooobably also make it a decent place while banning religious/politic conversations (though I've never seen it done well), but it seems like a bigger challenge for them. (Because, like, a person getting warned to cease and desist because they just mentioned going to church last Sunday is pretty dumb.)

Implementing a new species shouldn't be terribly hard since you can just build upon the existing framework of other species (unless there's a *special mechanic* to implement). Finishing up the Vaurca would mostly be a matter of lore, and the lore team has plenty of able and willing participants.

I'm actually wondering why the project has been cancelled - has a reason ever been stated besides "Covert is gone"?

I don't really understand what the "purpose" of x-ray vision and coldresist are. Nor why you'd want to remove TK yet hulk isn't even mentioned. Maybe it's because you can do annoying stuff with TK? None of the powers are terribly useful to non-antags, sadly (they're sorta the end-goal of genetics). I'd argue that TK actually has its non-antaggy uses, though most of it involves hitting switches and buttons you shouldn't be able to hit. Anyway, genetics should either get a rework or remain (mostly) untouched, but removing half of the major powers and leaving geneticists with nothing to do sounds kinda lame. (Though the job has always been in need of a rework to become something HRP-viable).

i have transcended the boundaries of common sense and exclusively limit myself to erping in the fifth dimension

the chinese are preparing for the mainland invasion

You should definitely ask for Scopes to give you teleport flags if you've been spending time around! I'll try to see if I can catch you on in the next few days, I haven't been on because I didn't really have anything to do and felt like no one else was playing haha.

It would be nice to know why medbay doctors (Phoebe, at least?) were shot. Some of the other things presented here aren't bad per se, but should be considered simply for the context they provide to the reported "kill-all" attitude of the ops. But I don't think people should be judged for stealing the spare ID, ordering weapons from cargo, or taking down Tcomms alone. There is nothing wrong with these actions, they're just here to explain why the other "bad" actions looked especially bad in context. Dunno if that was obvious or not - from the way the OP was phrased I was getting sorta afraid it wasn't. If it is then you can all ignore me and I'll shut up now

Duck said to me a long time ago that combat in SS13 was just "what follows a poorly executed gank". And looking at many scenarios in my time here, I'm tempted to agree with her. Chaotic "combat" can be fun, but as far as being robust and victorious, most of your chances of winning a battle come from good planning. From setting up traps, trump cards, fooling or misleading your opponents, or simply being prepared. Ranged SS13 combat is designed to be quick and deadly - the first person to get a few shots in (usually two hits) is almost guaranteed a knockdown, and from there, victory. The counterplay for the LWAP is supposedly to get up close and rush the shooter, but in a carefully prepared fight (aka. the good guys know where the antags are), there's not going to be a chance to close the gap. You get shot down as an opening move, and them bam, fight over, because that's the nature of SS13. If the intended purpose is truly to eliminate single antags who made themselves deserving of swift, laser-served justice, then it shouldn't be turned into an annoying support weapon (take down a single person at the beginning of a fight without giving them a chance, then move in to disable the remaining targets). I'd advise making it a one-shot rechargeable - which wouldn't really defy expectations considering the already terrible battery capacity of energy weapons in-universe. Let us not forget this used to be some people's go-to battle weapon, and will continue to be as long as it remains available and viable, regardless of any morals or fair-play involved.

So just add these gamemodes to secret? (Aren't they already, though?)

So you mean remove voting altogether (unless it's between secret and extended), and only run secret?

Maybe to refocus discussion a bit, the biggest hurdle this suggestion would encounter is that if left completely uninfluenced, there would always be a greater portion of people voting for secret than for any other gamemode. What would you all suggest to counter that?

Well, the only I could see this work would be by removing secret whatsoever and having the vote results "be" the secret round (basically not announcing the roundtype until the end of the game). A problem with that is that sometimes it can be really inconvenient to not know what the gamemode is. Some people only queue up certain characters for certain gamemodes (for example I might want to continue my office romance if it's extended, but queue up my action-hero doctor (with antag prefs on) if I know it's gonna be nuke). (Terrible examples I know)

The main problem I'd see with that is that secret is a high percentage more popular as a "starter" vote than any of the other gamemodes are. If 10 people want to play secret and 10 people want to play various specific gamemodes, secret is always going to win by default. What could we do to counter that? Also, I don't think there's any problem with "vote manipulation" (also known as "hey, guys, does anyone feel like playing vampire next round?") The main issue is it's outlawed because... it's outlawed. If nobody does it it gives an unfair advantage to the single person who mentions a gamemode, but I honestly wouldn't mind giving people a chance to discuss the next gamemode in a civil manner, proven it didn't turn into cries of "nuke, nuke, nuke!".

While having a mess of varied ideas doesn't make development easier, can't this thread be seen as a collection of minor changes under a unified theme? Basically a suggestion for a "rehaul" of botany?

You were not allowed to talk about it?

They would probably vote for extended more if they knew the chance for it to be picked in secret had been changed from highest to lowest though :^)

Well, if it's actually been reduced from the highest to the lowest possible option, that's something that should be announced to people lmao. That's pretty much good, though if it has a 1/18 chance of being picked in secret (thus a 1/18 chance of nothing happening - which sounds kinda lame, wouldn't it be better to remove it altogether?) Anyway, this is essentially what I wanted, though people should probably be made aware of that as I don't see a lot of people voting for extended atm.

Are you sure about that? I remember distinctly Skull increasing the chance of extended being picked in secret, not lowering it. So do other people I've asked. Also, claiming "it's always been this way so we shouldn't change it" doesn't seem like a good counter-argument to my proposition, unless you're saying something else I don't understand. Specific antag gamemodes would never win through that, they only do through strategic voting. That's make the server run only a mix of secret and extended, which... might be a downgrade? At least right now you have the advantage that people can group together if they want to run a certain gamemode.

I dunno how many times I've tried to explain this, so here we go again. It used to be that you didn't see extended happen often in secret. People usually voted secret to get antags, and extended to get extended. At some point in the past few months, people started voting for secret to get extended, or more precisely to get a chance at extended and prevent an antag gamemode (nuke, cult, etc.) from passing. Due to the lack of people voting for extended, the chance for secret to pick extended was increased. I'd like to bring the voting balance back to the old ways, where secret almost assuredly resulted in antags, and people would vote for extended to get extended, not secret. Removing extended from secret would encourage the people wanting extended to actually vote for it (and not secret). This change could easily be made clear through a server login announcement, and with the amount of discussion this topic has gotten, I'm fairly sure everybody in OOC would be quickly informed of it. (Also, it's only a "removal" in semantics - I'm not trying to get rid of anything, simply shift the balance of the voting system.)